A day trip to Trakai and more of Vilnius

Give me a city by a river and you can usually find running paths, luckily in Vilnius this is the case, my hotel is about a k from the main river thru Vilnius - Neris, it has quite deep sides so there are paths along next to the river and the paths by the roads that are probably 50 metres above the river, if you can understand that, if I had taken a picture then you would, I will do for the next Blog. I did about 8kms yesterday morning by the river and 10kms this morning.

After breakfast which as usual at all the hotels I have stayed at has been a big feast, I won't starve, I can usually then not have to eat to well in the afternoon. I decide to take a tour out to Trakai which is about 30-40kms from Vilnius it is one of the old capitals, it is only a small town, it is home to 2 of the ethnic minorities in Lithuania, the Karaims and another (the name escapes me, will add later). Our tor guide took us over to the main tourist attraction, the huge castle on the island, it dates back to the 1300's, and it has been home to a number of armies over the years, it was mainly built to protect them from the Polish renegades many moons ago. Over the years it has been slowly destroyed, by the 1900's there was less than half of the castle left, so over 4-5 attempts it was slowly rebuilt and finished in the 1990's, it was rebuilt with red bricks which you can see from my pic, I would have thought a lighter coloured brick would have not stood out as red does.

The front of the Castle

After I got back I did some more walking around Vilnius, I found one of the information centres, I was trying to find out if there was any Basketball games on while I was here, no luck, the Vilnius team is playing away both Friday and Saturday night, but I did find one of the local Lithuanian Restaurants that I will try for the local cuisine.

Interesting info on Lithuania, it has gone from 3.4 million to 3 million people in the last 10 years, no ski resorts here, its highest land point is just under 300 metres, its highest building is 340 metres.

It probably makes some of the best Linen in the world that nobody has heard of, the Vilnius area was occupied by the Polish between first and second world wars.